


A Spoonful of Sugar

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Cooking, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Happy Ending, Slow Build, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-25 09:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9812837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Jemma Simmons moves in with Leo Fitz in the fall.  It only takes her three more seasons to realize that she's madly in love with him. (Or, a love story in food.)





	1. Fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agentverbivore (verbivore8642)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verbivore8642/gifts).



> Written for the amazing agentverbivore for the Fitzsimmons Network's Secret Valentine exchange.
> 
> All recipe titles are from the Smitten Kitchen cooking blog. I'm hoping to have all of this posted by the end of next week--the next chapter should be up on Monday!

_Chocolate chip cookies, with a sprinkle of sea salt on top_  
The day that she moves in with Leo Fitz, Jemma Simmons arrives bearing cookies. She's always liked baking, the comfort of measuring out flour and sugar in exact amounts, of setting her bright blue kitchen timer and watching lumps of unformed dough transform themselves into perfectly formed scones or muffins or cookies. And admittedly, she's not above bribing him to give her the bigger bedroom. 

Leo Fitz is an unknown quantity and Jemma finds it unsettling. It isn't just that she's never lived with anyone besides Skye, who's just moved out of their tiny post-college Morningside Heights apartment and into a beautiful brownstone with her fiance Trip. It isn't just that he's a guy and she still has traumatic flashbacks from the year she spent living in a co-ed dorm with the entire lacrosse team. It's that she's deeply, ludicrously worried that he won't like her. And on the three occasions that she's interacted with him, he's ignored her completely. At a dinner that she suspects was originally conceived as a double-date, Fitz spent the entire evening drawing designs for some kind of machine on his napkin. At the massive end-of-summer picnic Trip organized, he stuck by his absurdly tall friend Mack for the whole time. And, last but certainly not least, at Trip and Skye's engagement party, he only said three words to Jemma. They were “looks like rain”.

“Of course Fitz likes you,” Skye says as she helps Jemma tape up the last of her boxes. “He wouldn't have agreed to live with you if he didn't.”

“People do crazy things for Manhattan real estate,” Jemma points out. “I can't spend twelve months being glared at over the breakfast table.”

“Fitz won't even be awake to glare at you in the mornings,” Trip puts in from where he's disassembling Jemma's end table. “My man's not a morning person.”

She doesn't exactly find that encouraging. 

The day that she and Fitz move in to their new apartment, he spends most of the day sitting in a pile of nails and pieces of what is supposed to be a dining room table. (The instructions are crumpled in a ball in the corner.) She thinks about offering her help, then remembers the fate of the instructions and goes back to alphabetizing her books.

“You like Good Omens?” he asks. Jemma nearly drops the book on her foot when she hears the sound of his voice. It's sometime around eight and the living room is still a heap of boxes and table parts but he's been so quiet for the past two hours, with only the occasional ominous mutter at a misbehaving screwdriver, that she almost forgot that another person inhabits her living room. 

“I do,” she blurts out. “It's one of my favorite books, actually. I mean, I love anything that Pratchett and Gaiman did on their own and this one just takes the best bits of both of them and smashes them together and--”

She's rambling. She shuts her mouth rather abruptly. He seems to want to keep on talking to her anyway. 

“So you've read Discworld too?”

“Of course I have!” Jemma says indignantly. She's prided herself on being well read ever since primary school, when she would march into the library every Sunday morning with a stack of last week's books and exchange them for a new set of the librarian's recommendations. (For quite a while, the piles of books had been almost as tall as her.) “I've always been rather fond of the witches, but you seem like you might be more of a Death kind of person.”

“City Watch, actually. Though Death is a close second,” Fitz volunteers and smiles shyly at her. “What else have you got? If you, uh, don't mind me looking at your books.”

They've read quite a lot of the same things, it turns out. Jemma doesn't know why she's surprised—she'd seen shelf after shelf of books in the apartment Fitz and Trip used to share. She just never quite thought that they'd be his. But Fitz has a set of very well formed theories about the possible endgame of A Song of Ice and Fire and a brilliant smile when he spots her Connie Willis books and a series of funny stories about his attempts to conquer Russian literature.

They order Chinese food for dinner and eat it sitting around the pile of dining room table parts and even if their conversation still halts and stutters sometimes, she manages to make him laugh four times and fiercely defend his latest invention twice.. Jemma thinks that maybe with another batch of chocolate chip cookies, she can convince Leo Fitz to like her for good. 

 

_Tomato sauce with onion and butter_  
Right, Jemma tells herself. Making tomato sauce can't possibly be that difficult. The recipe only has three ingredients, after all: a can of tomatoes, one medium-sized yellow onion, and five tablespoons of butter. She's supposed to just put it all in the pan and let it simmer but there's a smoky smell coming from underneath the burner. Something's probably stuck underneath it from Fitz's failed culinary experiments last week. (He wanted to do things with kale. She vacated the apartment for six hours.)

“Fitz!” she shouts. “Come fix the burner!”

“I already fixed it last week,” he calls back from the living room, where he's busy taking apart what she's telling herself isn't their toaster. 

“What do you mean by fix?” she asks suspiciously. 

“I just tinkered around with it a little. That one never gets quite as hot as the rest of the burners,” he says and pulls another gear out of the toaster.

“And how hot does it get now?”

“Hot. I, uh, don't know if I could put a specific number on it,” Fitz mutters. “Engineering isn't an exact science, you know.”

She barely keeps herself from pointing out that engineering had bloody better well be exact, especially once her sauce goes from sizzling to charred in five minutes flat. Fitz hides in his room for the rest of the night but he emerges for exactly three minutes to buy her Thai food as an apology. Better yet, there's another can of tomatoes and a yellow onion resting on their counter the next evening.

“I'll eat it no matter how it turns out,” he promises her. “And if you don't want me to mess around with an appliance, we'll...put a Post-It on it or something.”

The next morning, she wakes up early and plasters their kitchen in Post-Its. 

_Baked eggs with spinach and mushrooms_  
She and Fitz are slowly learning their way around each other. She's a morning person, he's not. (Except of course whenever the Rangers F.C. are playing. He'll wake up early on Saturday mornings and sit on the couch clutching a mug of tea and shouting insults at the team's goalie.) They have different ways of loading their tea mugs into the dishwasher. She forgets to switch off the hallway light, he forgets to dust the bookshelves, they occasionally leave passive-aggressive notes for each other and forget about them in the morning. 

But they order take-out together at least once a week and they swap books and sometimes they watch TV together on the couch and he lets her use him as a human pillow after 10pm and two beers, when they can both pretend that it's an accident. Jemma tries very hard to remind herself of these facts when he looks at her breakfast like it might singlehandedly bring about the apocalypse.

“What are you eating?” he asks, in the exact same tone he used when a spider invaded their kitchen three weeks ago.

“A Poptart,” she says around a mouthful of strawberry jam. “Toasted. I'm not a heathen.”

“And you eat this every single morning for breakfast?” Fitz crosses to the counter and rapidly reads the list of ingredients on the back of the box, his eyes widening in horror as he goes farther down the list. “I have a science degree and I can't even pronounce half of the things in here.”

“That's why it tastes good,” Jemma informs him. “Honestly, Fitz, it has fruit in it. It's not like I'm about to die from scurvy.”

“Scurvy is not the point.” Fitz starts pulling things out of the fridge. Green and leafy things. Jemma narrows her eyes at him suspiciously. “Come on. We need to wilt the spinach first.”

“Hasn't the spinach already had enough done to it?”

“We're making baked eggs with spinach and mushrooms. It has cream and parmesan in it so it's not entirely healthy,” he tells her and starts packing the spinach into a cast-iron skillet. “Want to chop the mushrooms?”

She wants to ask him why he cares what she eats anyway. She wants to ask him if he really thinks they could be that kind of roommates, who let their lives overlap outside the confines of their apartment's four walls. Theirs is entirely a relationship of convenience, built on mutual friends and a mutual inability to apartment hunt, and it's—she tells herself that it's just eggs. But no one has really cared what she eats in a while and there's something about the way Fitz fusses over the ingredients and casts dark looks in the direction of the Poptarts that sends a wave of warmth through her chest.

They start making breakfast together on Saturdays, each of them clutching a mug of tea in one hand and This American Life playing through the speakers of his laptop, and when he finally caves and agrees to make a French toast casserole one Saturday, she knows that he definitely likes her for good.

Cheesecake-marbled brownies  
Jemma concentrates very hard on chopping the chocolate into neat miniature squares. Then she'll put it in the double boiler with her precisely quartered butter and then she'll melt them together until they're perfectly blended and she will not have a nervous breakdown.

Her knife goes through the chocolate so hard that it leaves a sharp line in the cutting board.

“Still haven't heard back after your interview?” Fitz asks, peering around his bedroom door. Jemma shoots him a glare that, if weaponized, could probably reduce their apartment to smithereens. She had an interview at SHIELD Publishing exactly five days, three hours, and forty-eight minutes ago and although realistically she knows it'll take them at least a week to make their decision, she's spent the last five days with her phone less than a foot away from her at all times and her email constantly open on her laptop. She has her notifications turned up as loud as they can possibly go but she's still been checking her email every fifteen minutes just in case something slips through. Jemma just...she wants this so badly, with the kind of fierceness that's almost a tangible ache in her bones.

She's known that she wants to work in publishing since the first time she learned that was even something she could do. And she's known that she wants to work at SHIELD Publishing since the first time she read an article about Peggy Carter, SHIELD's legendary founder and the woman who discovered the most popular fantasy series since Harry Potter, famously champions diverse books and authors, and has art of her as a superhero punching the all-male board of HYDRA in the face hanging in her office. She's everything Jemma wants to be when she grows up. 

“Not yet,” she says and attacks another another bar of chocolate.

“I don't think they're going to call you on a Sunday,” Fitz points out. “But they'd be idiots not to hire you.”

“There's hundreds of other people in New York with resumes and experience identical to mine. They could probably throw everyone's applications up in the air and hire whatever one hits the ground first.” She's heard rumors that that's what they do at some of the biggest publishing houses, where they get applications from hundreds of equally qualified people every year. Skye says that she's being paranoid but she's just being practical.

“But there isn't anyone else in New York who understands books the way you do. Or who knows how to make them work better. I live with you,” Fitz adds when she turns to stare at him. “I hear you talk about books every single day. You know what you're doing.”

“You really think that?”

“Of course I do. Look, do you want to go out for lunch? We live near about a million restaurants and I'm sure that the chocolate's untimely death can come later. You kind of have a death grip on the knife and it's terrifying,” he adds cheerfully. “At least now I know that you could defend us from a burglar with the contents of our knife block.”

“If I have to defend us with the kitchen knives, then I'll know that the alarm system you designed failed and it'll totally be your fault,” she says dryly. She puts the chocolate and the butter away for later and gets her coat anyway. 

“I have a degree in quantitative econ too,” she tells him over eggs and pancakes. “I have a way with numbers and I--I could have gotten a job on Wall Street straight out of college. That would probably have been the smart thing to do.”

“Would you have liked working on Wall Street?” Fitz asks her.

“Probably not,” she admits. “I interned at a hedge fund one summer because my parents told me I had to find something that would actually pay me and every time that I went home for the day on Friday I wondered if they would notice if I ran away and didn't show up on Monday.”

“If I lived with you and you worked for some massive bank, I would fear for my life and sanity on a regular basis,” Fitz says primly.

“Hey! I fear for my life on a regular basis just living with you as you are.” Jemma giggles and suppresses the urge to stick her tongue out at him like they're both back in elementary school. Fitz always seems to end up making her laugh, no matter how dire things feel at the time. It's quite nice. 

“The microwave was entirely Hunter's fault. I will maintain that until my dying day.”

The Tuesday after they go out to breakfast, she gets a call from Peggy Carter herself with a job offer in the children's division of SHIELD Publishing. When she hangs up the phone, she squeals so loud that their next-door neighbor bangs on the wall, sprints into Fitz's room, and throws her arms around him and squeezes until he complains that she's cracked one of his ribs. 

_Mushroom marsala pasta bake_  
Fitz is going out on a date. It's stranger than the fact that he owns a shirt that actually fits him.

“I thought you didn't date,” Jemma says from her spot on the couch, firmly ensconced with the manuscript she's editing for work and a bowl of the mushroom pasta they made yesterday night. (She finally managed to avoid burning the mushrooms. Fitz asked her if she wanted a medal.) “I've never seen you go out on a date in all the months I've been living with you.”

“Mack set it up with one of Elena's friends. 's a double date so if things go badly, Mack can be my human shield,” Fitz explains. 

“Has it gone that badly before?” Jemma arches an eyebrow at him.

“Only once or twice.” Then he's ducking out the door before she can say anything else and she's left with the idea of Fitz on a date. Fitz dating. What if he brings someone home with him? What if she has to hear them through the walls? What if it slowly sends her mad, cruelly cutting off her promising publishing career? Jemma's not quite sure exactly why Fitz's romantic endeavors would send her mad but she doesn't doubt their ability to do so. (It's probably about the possibility of losing her steady supply to a source of food, she reasons. She's developed an unhealthy addiction to the pink Himalayan sea salt Fitz insists on putting on everything. And maybe to their now regular Sunday morning brunches too.)

Jemma stabs a mushroom a little more fiercely than the occasion warrants and turns another page of her manuscript. It's a modern-day fairy tale retelling featuring a romance between the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming and Captain Hook. Some of the plot twists verge on the implausible but she can't help being swept up in the story anyway and she's well into a plot involving the Underworld when the door opens and Fitz dramatically pronounces that he's never dating again. 

“Did she set you on fire?” Jemma asks and scribbles another note in the margins of the manuscript. 

“Why did you go straight to fire?” Fitz peers suspiciously at her. “Have you ever set anyone on fire?”

“It was entirely on accident,” Jemma protests, willing herself not to blush. It wasn't like the shirt her date had been wearing had been a particularly nice one. (Purple and electric yellow check.) Really, she'd done a favor to the women of the world. 

“So what went wrong then?” she adds after a minute. “She doesn't like Doctor Who? Has a personal trainer ex-boyfriend who's just bulging with muscles? Didn't want to order dessert?”

“Nothing was wrong.” Fitz sighs as he flops down on the floor. “She was nice and smart and very pretty and I—I just didn't feel the kick.”

“The kick?”

“You know, the first time you see someone—not the first time proper that you see them, but the first time that you really see them. And you feel like you've had the breath taken right out of you. Or like your first drink is hitting you all over again. It's—it's electric,” Fitz says His cheeks are flushed and he's staring up at the ceiling with a fascinated expression and she suspects that he's been drinking but she can't help listening anyway. 

“And you've actually felt this with someone?” The closest she's ever gotten to electricity with anyone was when her most recent ex-boyfriend finally got her back into her Netflix account. 

“Of course I have. We both know that I'm the romantic one here, Simmons.” Fitz snorts.

“I can be romantic!” Jemma says defensively, sitting bolt upright. “I bought my last boyfriend a very nice sweater last Christmas.”

Fitz just rolls his eyes at the ceiling. She throws her pen at him.


	2. Winter

_Chocolate caramel crunch almonds_  
“So you want to know if these are worthy of Peggy Carter?” Skye asks and takes another handful of the chocolate almonds Jemma's been tinkering with all day. Trip's entire family is in town for Thanksgiving and she's fled to Jemma and Fitz's apartment, claiming that she'll go crazy if she has to hear one more question about which of his twenty cousins she's going to choose as one of her bridesmaids. (She's already asked Jemma and Bobbi to do it so competition for the one remaining bridesmaid slot has been fierce.)

“I'm not giving Peggy Carter almonds. These are for everyone else I work with.” Jemma explains and dumps another batch of almonds in the holiday sprinkles she went to three different grocery stores to find. Finding the right balance of red and green is practically impossible, not to mention the debate over whether to stick with straightforward sprinkles or be daring and incorporate a miniature snowflake or two. She had nearly called her younger sister in the store to gather a fifth opinion, but had thought better of it when she saw the way the store clerk was glaring at her. 

“Peggy Carter is getting my famous gingerbread,” Jemma says proudly. “I got an inside tip from her husband that she likes it.”

She's met Peggy's husband Steve, who bears a significant resemblance to a Greek god, exactly three times. The first time, she just stared at him and tried to reclaim her jaw from where it had dropped to the floor. (Maria, who worked in the office next door, told her that was a perfectly normal reaction.) The second time, she managed to choke out a hello and refrain from asking him if he could single-handedly hold off a helicopter. The third time, he actually asked her for a dinner recommendation in the area and after a frantic text consultation with Fitz and Skye, she suggested a tucked-away French restaurant famous for their steak frites and crème brulee. And judging from the way Peggy had practically been humming as she came into the office the next morning, it had been an unqualified success.

“Does your long-suffering best friend get some too?” Skye bats her eyes shamelessly and snakes her hand out to steal another handful.

“You and Trip can get the test batch,” Jemma says firmly. “You already ate half the almonds this morning.”

“It's the sprinkles. But seriously, Jem—are you happy at SHIELD?” Skye leans forward across the table. “You've wanted to work there forever.”

“I really am. I love the books that I work on and the people that I work with and I—I'm really happy. Happier than I've been in a while.” When she thinks about her life now, she thinks about the satisfying weight of a book she's edited in her hands or the thrill of excitement that runs through her whenever she reads the first sentence of a promising manuscript or the bright sound of Skye's laugh and Bobbi's easy jokes. She thinks about the way snow looks in Central Park or the new coffee place she's discovered on her breaks with Maria and Natasha or the way they all cram themselves into a booth every Friday night at Phil's and she feels the kind of sure, steady happiness that she wants to store up for as long as possible.

And maybe, sometimes, she thinks about Fitz's careful hands measuring out spices or the light of his blue eyes in the morning. And maybe that makes her happy too.

_Cheddar and broccoli soup_  
“So are you going home for Christmas?” Jemma asks and looks up from where she's trying to cram another pair of socks into her suitcase. She has an early flight to Heathrow Friday morning and she'll be home just in time to bake Christmas biscuits with her mum, prevent her dad from grievously injuring himself trying to put up the lights, and cast suspicious looks at her younger sister's latest mopey musician boyfriend. 

“No, my mum's coming here. Says that she wants to do all the tourist things,” Fitz says absently and stirs the cheddar broccoli soup that she coaxed him into making. “We'll probably have to go to the top of the Empire State Building and go ice skating at Rockefeller Center. Someone'll definitely try to sell us scalped Lion King tickets.”

He's grinning when he says it, though, and Jemma suspects that he's more excited than he's letting on. Fitz talks to his mum every Sunday for hours at a time, sometimes beckoning Jemma over to witness that yes, he's cleaning his room and eating his vegetables, and he's got a photo of them propped up on top of his dresser. (She's asked him if there's a whole album of embarrassing childhood photos somewhere. He still steadfastly refuses to answer.)

“Next year, though, we're going somewhere warm. With a beach. We never really went anywhere when I was growing up,” Fitz explains and stirs the soup more intently. “It was always just the two of us so...My dad left when I was a kid. But then, he was a right bastard to both of us so 's not like we were missing much.”

“Oh.” Jemma's breath catches in her throat. “I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault.” Fitz shrugs, his back stiff as he pokes at the soup again. “Wasn't like he hit me or anything. Just thought I was stupid.”

“I'm still sorry. And Fitz, you're not—you're one of the most brilliant people I know. Brilliant and caring and thoughtful and I—I'm very lucky to live with you.” Her heart is beating faster than usual, thumping away so rapidly that she can hear the blood rushing in her ears. It's inexplicable. But she needs to let Fitz know that he's the furthest thing from an idiot that she can possibly imagine and that's all she can really think as she watches Fitz's shoulders slowly soften and she goes over to the stove to lean her chin on his shoulder. 

Fitz doesn't say anything in response but when she reaches over to squeeze his hand during dinner, he lets her.

Things are different after that

_Pear and hazelnut muffins_  
One of Jemma's new year resolutions is to go on a date. One measly date. She's even let Bobbi download Stark Industries' new dating app to her phone and Skye swipe through the array of men who are apparently also desperate enough to look for love on the Internet. Even if she had to avert her eyes and focus very intently on her book while they were doing it. 

“Do I get to meet him?” Fitz says around a mouthful of muffin, sprawled out on the couch. Her date with Milton (age 27, Cornell graduate, currently in med school) starts in exactly twelve hours and for all she knows, he could be a murderer looking for his next victim. So she's stress-baking. It's a perfectly normal reaction.

“Would you tell me if you thought he looked like a murderer?” she demands.

“I thought that Skye already did some background research on him.” And his high school teachers, college classes, how many tries it had taken him to get his drivers' license, his Netflix watching history, and likes on various forms of social media. Her best friend had spent most of high school breaking into highly secure systems and while Skye had managed to avoid getting into any trouble with a job offer from Google, her illegal activities now mostly consist of pirating Westworld. 

“I wouldn't let her hack into the FBI again,” Jemma says primly. 

“You're no fun.” Fitz frowns at her. “I can't believe that his name is Milton.”

“Plenty of people are named Milton,” she points out. 

“Seventy-year-old people whose idea of fun is a rousing game of backgammon and a jigsaw puzzle in the evenings,” Fitz grumbles. “Where's he taking you for dinner anyway?”

“A steakhouse, I think. They're famous for their creamed spinach.” She'd said yes to the first restaurant he suggested without doing any research beforehand, too nervous that he'd immediately retract his offer if she suggested somewhere else. Fatal mistake, really. 

“But you don't like creamed spinach.” Fitz blinks up at her.

“That's not the point.” She shoves the last batch of muffins into the oven and shuts the door with an emphatic click. It's not like she asked for Fitz's opinion on her date. Or like she wants him to approve of it. Because she doesn't exactly mind Fitz disapproving of Milton. He just wants something good for her, the kind of man who asks her where she wants to go to dinner and is willing to watch all 327 minutes of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series with her. Someone who makes her happy. And she doesn't mind that.

Her date isn't a disaster. It would have been so much simpler if it had been an unqualified disaster. Milton is nice enough, if a little uninterested in the details of her job, and he orders her an extra baked potato when she tells him that she doesn't like creamed spinach. He's tall and attractive, despite his overly round head, and he's hoping to become a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Seventeen-year-old Jemma, with her neat lists of desired characteristics in a boyfriend, would be delighted. Twenty-four-year-old Jemma is bored. 

When Milton asks what she's doing next weekend at the end of their date, she tells him that she's busy. And when she comes back to their apartment, Fitz is sitting on the couch waiting for her. 

“You look beautiful,” he blurts out when she lets the door shut behind her. Then he promptly turns bright red. “I didn't mean to—I wasn't here when you left—I just thought that you ought to know.”

Five minutes ago, trudging along the sidewalk from the subway, she had felt distinctly rumpled. Her hair was coming out of its twist, the straps of her dress had left a red mark on her shoulders, and her lipstick had worn off entirely when confronted with steak. But now, looking at Fitz looking at her, kicking off her heels to sink her feet into the soft weave of their carpet and unpinning her hair, she feels lovely. Really, truly lovely. 

Something warm sparks through her, sliding down her spine and radiating all the way out to the tips of her fingers. 

 

_Hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps_  
They've been stuck inside the apartment for three days when she realizes that she wants to kiss him. She blames it on cabin fever. And maybe the alcohol. 

It snowed all day Monday and Tuesday and now, after a storm dropped three feet of snow on New York, neither of them feel like trying to venture outside. They've finished all of their shows, she's craving new books but doesn't want to fight her way to the Strand, and he's been prohibited from taking apart any more of their appliances. So they're drinking and watching Bridget Jones' Diary. 

“That's what I want,” Jemma announces loudly. “Someone to like me just the way I am.   
Preferably that someone would be Colin Firth but I'm not too picky.”

“Why would someone want you to be any different?”

“Because they always do. They wish I was skinnier, or curvier, or less likely to correct them when they're talking about literature, or that I skied or cooked or gave better blowjobs.” She looks longingly again at Colin Firth in his ugly Christmas sweater. Mark Darcy would never invite her on a ski trip and then leave her stranded on the bunny hill with all the eight-year-olds while he flirted with the ski instructor. 

Fitz looks like he might be choking on the popcorn, his face the shade of a tomato, but he recovers and manages to choke out something about not needing to know any of the details about her past boyfriends, thanks. “I don't even know what someone would want to change about you,” he adds after a minute and takes another sip of spiked hot chocolate. “I think you're doing pretty well, Simmons. Apart from the whole Poptart thing, of course.”

She clutches her current toasted Poptart to her chest and he falls back laughing against the pillows and his shirt rides up just an inch or two and...She shouldn't even be noticing it. But Fitz is surprisingly lean for someone who works in a lab all day and she can't help wondering if the muscles she's glimpsing go any farther up. Her mouth is dry. Her pulse is humming again. She can't seem to sit still. 

Jemma's not entirely sure, but she thinks that for a minute, she wanted to climb into her roommate's lap and kiss him senseless. She's not sure what to do with that.


	3. Spring

_Spring vegetable potstickers_  
“No Fitz today?” Trip asks. “My man's letting me down.”

“Apparently he has a very rare strain of flu,” Jemma tells him and tries to keep a straight face. “He was still in bed when I left this morning.”

“Funny, I think Hunter has the same thing,” Bobbi remarks and leans across the table to dip another potsticker in soy sauce. “Only he doesn't have any gourmet leftovers to bribe Trip and Skye with.”

“Tell him that I'm shocked and heartbroken that he doesn't want to paint mason jar vases with us for the wedding. And that the bribery definitely isn't going to work, because he and Hunter are both permanently on my hit list,” Skye teases. She and Trip are getting married in May but they've been enlisting their friends to make wedding crafts since the middle of January. Considering that so far today they've managed to produce six mason jars in three hours, Jemma thinks that perhaps they should have started even earlier. She doesn't want to even imagine what things might look like once they have to start addressing wedding invitations. (She's been taking calligraphy classes just in case.)

“You know, if we'd just set up an assembly line like I wanted to, we'd be nearly done already,” Jemma says hopefully. She had a five-step plan. It was tragically shot down.

“Hey! We are going to struggle with our collective lack of artistic ability like true friends.” Skye flicks her paintbrush in Jemma's direction. She flicks back. It only goes downhill from there.

They're all covered in paint by the end of the evening. Not very many mason jars have been painted. But they've drunk about three bottles of wine, consumed truly obscene amounts of Chinese food, and watched two of the street racing movies that Trip and Skye love. You missed out, she texts Fitz while they're watching Robbie Reyes fight on the top of an entire highway of moving cars. And I'm not saving any orange chicken for you.

Fitz responds with a picture of himself looking dejected and Jemma laughs, letting her fingers linger over the lines of his face for a moment before she locks her phone and slips it into her bag. What she felt on that snow day was an aberration. The result of peppermint schnapps and the restless feeling of not being able to leave the apartment for days on end. Still, she can't help admitting that Fitz is objectively handsome. He's not exactly her usual type, nothing like the muscle-bound giants she used to sneak glances at whenever she went to the gym in college or the personal trainer she dated for three disastrous weeks. But his eyes are a shade of blue that seems to change every time she looks at them and there's a spot along the curve of his shoulder where her head fits and he has a smile whenever he's truly surprised and happy about it that she thinks might reaffirm her faith in the universe. 

“I can't believe it's only two months to the wedding,” Skye says happily, sliding in beside Jemma on the couch and flopping her legs over Jemma's lap. She's got paint smeared across the bridge of her nose and she's wearing the ridiculous fuzzy alien socks Trip got her for their six-month anniversary with the Deadpool leggings he bought for her last Christmas. Her hair's falling out of its ponytail and she's just consumed her weight in Chinese and four mini cupcakes. And she's glowing. 

She still remembers when Skye came home from her first date with Trip. It was a warm June night in the summer after they graduated from college, warm enough to make Jemma open up all the windows and let the sounds of the city in but not yet suffocatingly hot. Skye came in a few minutes before midnight, her heels cheerfully clicking up the stairs to their fourth floor walk-up, and when Jemma asked her how her date had been, all she'd said was that it was perfect. She'd swallowed starlight somewhere along the way, eyes shining and smile curling across her mouth no matter what else she did, and Jemma had just known that things were never going to be the same.

“So you're excited?” Jemma asks and curls deeper into the couch. She's missed this, her and Skye sprawled out across the couch and talking for hours and hours on end. “Have you figured out where you're going for the honeymoon yet?”

“We're getting Eurorail passes and going to Europe for a month. I have a bet going with Bobbi that I can get Trip to eat an authentic Parisian croissant.” She snakes a hand over to the coffee table so she can grab her laptop and show Jemma all the places she's bookmarked: the hikes Trip wants to take in Ireland, the intricate stonework of the Alhambra in Spain, the amusement park in the center of Copenhagen, the fairy tale skyline of Prague, the sparkling beaches dotted along the coast of Italy, the million and one things she and Trip want to see for the first time together. Jemma peers over her shoulder with a running commentary, scribbling recommendations that she thinks of down on scraps of paper, making additions and corrections and letting Skye spin out everything she imagines in front of her. Things haven't always been easy for her best friend—she worked two part-time jobs for all of college, her dad has a way of dropping in and out of her life, and her mom seems more interested in expanding her mindfulness empire than paying attention to her daughter—but now she seems so happy. Especially with Trip. It's the kind of happy that Jemma used to think only existed on the screen or at the ends of trashy romance novels. But now, watching Trip smile as he looks at Skye talking about the beer crawl they absolutely have to do in Munich, she thinks that maybe she believes in it after all. 

“So are you thinking of taking anyone to the wedding?” Skye thinks she's being sneaky, so Jemma pretends to act surprised. (Trip warned her about this when he took her coat in the hall.)

“Not really.” Jemma shrugs and tries to sound casual. “I'm not seeing anyone right now and the idea of picking someone out based on how nice they'd look in a suit and how well they hold their drink is a little...well, it's not like I could create a survey for it or anything.” 

“Did you try to make a survey for it?”

Jemma reluctantly nods.

“Can we go out to bars and impose the survey on unsuspecting men?” Skye bounces a little in her seat.

“No.” Jemma shakes her head firmly and changes the subject from the survey that's still saved as a neat Word document as her computer and that no one can ever, ever find. “Besides, I'll probably be so busy with maid of honor duties that I'd be a terrible date. I can't imagine what I'd want a boyfriend for anyway.”

“I don't think it'll happen because you want a boyfriend,” Skye says carefully and squeezes Jemma's hand. “I think it'll happen because you want someone in particular.”

_scrambled egg toast_  
It's ridiculous. But she's making a list of what she'd want a boyfriend for. She can't stop thinking about it now.

She has her favorite notebook and a purple ink pen and scrambled eggs on toast and Earl Grey. She's fully equipped for this. (She just hopes that Fitz doesn't see.)

This is her list:  
1\. Someone to go out to dinner with.  
2\. Someone to sit beside her at the movies. (Who won't steal all the popcorn.)  
3\. Someone who will curl up beside her late at night at the couch and read while she reads.  
4\. Someone to take care of her when she gets sick.  
5\. Someone who doesn't always love the same things she does but tries them anyway.  
6\. Someone who she can just be with, easy as breathing, where all the jagged edges of his life will meet up with hers.  
7\. Someone who makes her laugh.  
8\. Someone who makes her believe.  
9\. Someone who--

She stops writing in the middle of item number nine, her pen skidding across the paper in a streak of purple. Then she tears the list into as many pieces as possible and hides them all at the bottom of their recycling bin. 

Because Fitz does all of those things for her. And she doesn't think that she wants anyone else to do them. 

_Wedding cake_  
Trip and Skye's wedding is beautiful. It's bright and clear and warm and the afternoon light coats everything in gold. Skye practically shimmers in her wedding dress as she holds on to Trip's hands, sliding the ring on to his finger with careful hands. They can't seem to look away from each other, from the moment Skye first walks down the aisle to when they begin reciting their vows to each other to their first kiss as husband and wife, and Jemma's heart catches in her chest a little watching them.

“Much better than Scottish weddings,” Fitz tells her after the ceremony. He's standing on the other side of the door to the bathroom in her hotel room, waiting for Jemma to change out of her bridesmaid dress and into her dress for the reception. “Someone always ends up getting drunk at my family weddings. Usually ends in a fight. Or my aunts get into another argument about who was supposed to get my great-grandmother's china. That could end in a fight too.”

“Now that, I don't believe,” Jemma calls through the door. “I thought all your aunts were lovely women who knitted scarves and sent you tins of shortbread.”

“Not when it comes to the china. They'll be hitting each other with their handbags, shouting obscure Scottish insults, sending shortbread hurling through the air...”

Jemma bursts into laughter and loses her grip on the buttons of her dress. It's beautiful, a deep crimson that she'd normally never wear but that Bobbi talked her into buying and that cinches in tight at her waist before flaring out into a dramatic full skirt. It also happens to have an open back only held together by two tiny buttons at the very top of the dress that she can't seem to fasten no matter how hard she tries. 

“Could you help me?” she asks, clutching the fabric of the dress to her chest. “I can't get the buttons.”

Fitz opens the door and she immediately turns her back to him, fighting the urge to blush. He's seen her in her pajamas and her exercise clothes, both of which show more skin than this dress. She keeps on blushing anyway as Fitz's hands linger on her shoulder before quickly fastening the buttons. 

“You're always so warm,” she blurts out. “How do you manage that?”

“You just think that because your hands always feel like you've dipped them in an ice bath. It's unnatural, is what it...” Fitz trails off as she spins to face him. He looks at her. Just looks like he can't imagine anything else he'd want to look at. 

“Right,” he manages after a moment and holds his arm out to her. “Shall we?”

He only leaves her side twice the entire night, once to dance with Skye and once to dance with Bobbi. It's quite funny to watch Bobbi steer him around the dance floor. Fitz can't dance to save his life but Bobbi was trained in formal ballroom dance at boarding school. Otherwise, he's right next to her making jokes about the DJ's choice of songs, bringing her snacks and a truly massive piece of wedding cake, and warding off any of Hunter's friends who try to ask her to dance. (She went on half a double date with Hunter, Bobbi, and one of Hunter's friends once. Hunter owed her favors for months.)

Fitz even lets her drag him out on to the dance floor once or twice. They're both terrible dancers, completely off the beat, and they end up cheerfully flailing about in their own little corner of the dance floor with the rest of their friends, trying to remember all their cheesy dance moves from middle school. She can't stop laughing when Fitz does his rendition of the shopping cart and nearly falls over. 

Fitz and Jemma dance one slow dance together. It's entirely unintentional. They simply don't get off the dance floor fast enough. But she rests her head on his shoulder, just a little, and she memorizes the feel of his hand at her waist and she stores up the moment to remember over and over again. 

It's past midnight by the time they finally start driving back. Fitz is sprawled out asleep in the backseat, the sky's lit up with every star she can name and some she can't, a love song is playing on the radio, and Jemma realizes something she should have known a long time ago 

“I'm afraid that I'm quite madly in love with you,” she says into the night. “Do you mind?”


	4. summer

_melon agua fresca_  
She keeps on realizing it. Fitz will be drinking tea across from her in the morning or staring down at a set of designs in the kitchen table, fingers idly tapping against his jaw, or glancing up from reading his book to smile at her and it hits her in a particularly ungraceful way. She's in love with her roommate and there really doesn't seem to be any way around it.

Half of her would like very much not to be in love with him. Because if she tells him and he doesn't feel the same, things will go up in flames rather spectacularly. Fitz will probably flee immediately and she'll never get to make dinner with him again. Or watch a movie on the couch and listen to him shouting at the characters to stick together and avoid creepy unlit hallways. Or even have him scowl at her when she makes him stop to get half a dozen donuts. She simply can't bear the idea of a version of her world that doesn't have Fitz in it. And she doesn't know when that happened.

Jemma Simmons, however, does not wallow. Or sulk or mope or spend time curled up underneath her blankets with a paperback romance novel entitled When a Scot Ties the Knot and red wine in a coffee mug. Instead she edits her latest manuscript with furious determination, makes three different kinds of pie, and hauls an eight-pound honeydew melon home from the farmer's market. 

“What are you going to do with it?” Fitz asks her over his book.

“Make agua fresca, I think. I need to blend things violently together in a food processor,” she says and sets the melon down on the counter with a thump.

“Any particular reason why?”

“My train wasn't air-conditioned today.” She shrugs and steadfastly keeps her back to him. “Everyone needs to be over-aggressive with their food processor sometimes.”

“Is everything okay at work?” Fitz asks after she starts disemboweling the melon.

“Everything's great at work!” she chirps. Maybe it comes out a little too high-pitched because Fitz puts down his book and comes over to the counter. And then he's right there in front of her and her heart is hammering and her breath is coming too quickly and it is patently unacceptable that he seems to have suddenly acquired a sense of style just when she's realized that she's in love with him. Fitz used to pad around their apartment in jeans singed from experiments gone wrong and t-shirts printed with obscure geek references. Now, he has pants that actually fit him and shirts that bring out the blue of his eyes and sunglasses that he takes off with a dramatic flourish that she should not find attractive in any way, shape, or form. Instead, she should be trying to break him of the habit before it gets any more elaborate. But love has apparently rendered her temporarily incapable of scolding Fitz properly. The other day, he spilled honey all over one of their counters and she couldn't even bring herself to scowl at him.

“Is there, er, is there a guy?” Fitz blurts out. “Because if someone's hurt you, I could—I mean, it's not like I could exactly punch the guy but I could probably make his life hell. Or get Hunter to punch him for you.”

“There isn't any guy.” She tries to keep her tone light and even but some part of her is bursting to tell him that there is someone, after all. There's him. (She suspects that it's always been him.) She adds more melon to the food processor instead. “But I still want to know what you were going to do.”

“Not much. Just ensure that any elevator he enters for the rest of his life will be playing 'Who Let the Dogs Out' on repeat. Or turn off the air conditioning in his office for the rest of the summer.”

“I'm terrified,” she says dryly. 

“Jane wanted me to background check the next guy you go out with, you know.” Fitz grins at her. “Quite proud that she picked me for that.”

“I knew it was a mistake to let you meet her,” Jemma mutters. Her friend Jane is a whirlwind of nervous energy, fueled by rage at the astronomy journals who refuse to publish her articles on the research on parallel universe she's been doing in New Mexico for nearly seven years now, massive cups of coffee provided by her assistant Darcy, and a steady diet of Poptarts. She and Fitz had chattered at each other about telescopes for nearly two and a half hours when she came to visit Jemma in the city last month until Jemma had eventually left the apartment to get croissants and reasoned that Jane could only fit so many embarrassing college stories into fifteen minutes. Clearly, that had been a grave miscalculation.

“Well, after the guy with seven parking tickets...” Fitz shakes his head sadly. “What am I going to do with you, Jemma Simmons?”

She can think of lots of things.

_Magic plum apple cobbler_  
There are sunflowers sitting on their kitchen table. A massive bunch of bright yellow sunflowers so big that it almost spills out of their lone vase. All the windows are open to let in the warm night air and there's something baking in the kitchen and Jemma feels contentment travel all the way down to the tips of her toes.

“You're not supposed to be back yet.” Fitz's head appears from beneath the counters of the kitchen, a streak of flour dusting his nose. “The Italian food's still on its way and the cobbler needs five more minutes.”

“What's all this for?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise. To celebrate the book,” he adds. Jemma's been working on this book for almost a year now, the first in a series that SHIELD thinks is going to be a massive hit, and today it made its first appearance on the best-seller lists, accompanied by a slew of positive reviews.

“Fitz,” she breathes. Wanting to kiss him isn't a new feeling by now and yet she's still surprised every time it washes over her, the urge to wrap her arms around him and promise him everything she can without words. 

“I saw a review of it today and thought we ought to do something. 'S not much and I probably should have planned it properly but I couldn't not do something, you know?”

“I know.” She meets his eyes and this—this is not something that roommates do for each other. This is something more than communal dinners and shared TV shows and lost keys. This is something that hangs thick in the air between them and cries out for their attention. For a minute, she thinks that he feels it too, this crackling feeling that curves through her veins and stretches out towards him with yearning fingers. And for now, that's enough.

_Peach melba popsicles_   
If her life were neatly written out, there'd be a million clues for her to decipher about how Fitz feels. The pages would be packed with subtle foreshadowing and repeated symbols and yearning glances that leap straight off the page and casual conversations freighted with meaning. But she's stumbling in the dark, trying to decide between a million different shades of love and like and infatuation and casual desire and passing interest and she—there's really one way to know. The narrative demands it.

She has to tell him how she feels. And if he doesn't...then he doesn't. Plenty of men haven't before, even if none of them ever made her feel quite as electric as Fitz does, and she's pieced herself back together plenty of times before. 

Jemma has lots of elaborate plans for telling him. Some of them involve long walks through Central Park or rides in a horse-drawn carriage. Others involve baking an elaborate layer cake and springing her confession on him while he's in the midst of eating it. Some of them are even designed by Skye and Bobbi and involve blatant seduction of the kind she's always felt slightly ridiculous doing. She's keeping a list in her planner, written in a cryptic code, of all the ideas she likes best.

She never uses any of them.

It's a night in the middle of July, too hot for either of them to fall asleep. Instead they're sitting on their fire escape at three in the morning and trying to stargaze, hands still sticky from the popsicles they made around midnight. 

“I told you that you can't see stars in New York,” he tells her sleepily and leans a little more against her side. “Too much light pollution.”

“You can always go to bed.”

“Nope.” he shakes his head firmly. “I'm staying out here till you find your star. And I know that you'll say that I don't have to, but I want to, Jemma.”

“You almost never call me Jemma,” she says softly.

“You call me by my last name all the time so...” he trails off and tips his head back towards the sky. “But 's a pretty name. Like something precious.”

She kisses him because she wants to tell him that he's something precious to her too. 

It's surprisingly easy, in the end. She turns her head and tilts into him and there he is, leaning forward to catch her. His mouth is soft and careful on hers and at first, it's a kiss with all the nervous precision of a first. Her hands stay knotted in her lap, even though one of them is itching to lean up and trace the lines of his face. She can hardly bear to shut her eyes for fear that he might disappear if she does. But then Fitz tentatively brings one hand up to fit around the curve of her waist and she coaxes his mouth open with her own and they're clinging to each other under the New York City lights.

Jemma kisses him and kisses him until she's dizzy with it. Until dawn light begins to streak across the sky and a bike messenger whistles up at them from the street. Then she tugs Fitz back through the window and into their living room, where she curls up in his lap on the couch like a particularly contented cat.

“How long have you known?” he asks.

“At Trip and Skye's wedding. But I think some part of me knew long before that,” she admits. “When did you...”

“The first time I met you. I spent that entire dinner trying to think up clever things to say to you and rejecting all of them,” he says with a little twist of his mouth. 

“I thought you didn't like me!”

“No, not at all,” Fitz protests vigorously. “I liked you too much for my own good.”

“What about now?” she asks and shifts her hips down against his. Fitz tips his head back against the couch and groans. She leans in to nip at the spot where the curve of his neck meets his shoulder and is rewarded with another groan. “Still like me too much for your own good?”

“Always,” he sighs. She catches his mouth with hers again and slides one hand underneath the   
hem of his t-shirt, tugging at it a little.

“Okay?” she whispers. She feels greedy suddenly, for every last bit of him she can get.

“Of course. We can—we can do whatever you want, Jemma.” He draws in a shaky breath, eyes bright, and she—no one's ever looked at her like she's all they've ever wanted before. And suddenly she's breathless too. 

There are so many things she wants from him. Years worth of them. But for now she can settle for this: a boy and a girl kissing on a couch in the middle of New York City as the sun comes up, in the center of their own small universe.


End file.
